As the person skilled in the art will appreciate, the internal combustion engine has now been with us for many decades and has become a most familiar design wherein the reciprocating piston uses connecting rods to connect the piston to the crank pins of the crank shaft to translate linear reciprocating motion of the pistons to rotary motion of the crank shaft.
For the most part, a connecting rod is articulable at both ends where it attaches to the piston and crank pin. This piston is connected to the connecting rod by a wrist pin that passes through the piston and the connecting rod. For the most part, these kinds of designs for such internal combustion engines are known as slider crank engines. Nonetheless, time has proven that these types of internal combustion engines do have significant disadvantages and limitations.
There has been a push, particularly now that fossil fuels are becoming scarce and there is a greater community emphasis to protect the environment by way of exhaust coming from conventional internal combustion energy, to improve upon the conventional slider crank engine.
The Scotch yoke has been used in certain engine designs seeking to utilize cyclic dynamics over the slider crank engines.
For the most part, traditional Scotch yoke engines connect two horizontally opposed pistons by non-articulable connecting rods to a shuttle having a slot which accommodates the crank pin of a crank shaft. Guide services constrain the motion of the shuttle to a linear path and the crank pin slides within the slot as the crank shaft rotates through its range, converting the linear reciprocating piston movement to rotary crank shaft motion.
As the person skilled in the art will realise, the slot within the shuttle must be at least as wide as the crank pin diameter and at least as long as the diameter of the crank pin travel.
Further, as the piston rod is part of a piston plate or the like which is restricted to linear reciprocated motion, any movement of the crank shaft will automatically see the piston extended or retracted away from any settable momentary position, including the sparking position.
A present trend in engine design is to increase engine rpm using the conventional piston rod with a Scotch yoke structure. The use of convention scotch yokes is not always possible for the most part as the piston stroke is short and the time available for drawing air into the combustion chamber is very short. This causes combustion at less than the ideal 15 to 1 air/fuel ration for the fuel which in turn, leaves unburnt fuel to be exhausted as pollutants into the atmosphere.
With the exhausted unburnt fuel goes wasted energy which should have been converted to power to drive the piston.
What effectively is happening in both currently available slider crank engines as well as Scotch yoke base designs is that there is inefficient coupling between the piston rod and the crank shaft, and to date, to overcome this problem all people have ever done is to try to counteract the problem by including additional expensive intake valves placed into each cylinder to facilitate the additional air intake that has resulted from incomplete combustion of the air/fuel mixture.
Hence, one of the best ways to surmount the inefficiency in piston rod/crank shaft coupling is to create a mechanism whereby a piston rod would be in its fully extended position for a moment of time rather than a point of time, wherein the entire force of the piston would be in complete perpendicular positioning in its upper most position in the firing chamber to then provide an ignition which guarantees the effective combustion of the air/fuel mixture.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to overcome at least some of the aforementioned problems or to provide the public with a useful alternative.
It is a further object of this invention to provide an internal combustion engine based on the principles of using a Scotch yoke configuration, wherein the piston and/or pistons can be placed in their topmost position for a period of time for the effective ignition and combustion of the air/fuel mixture for a given fuel charge, hence therefore providing arguably an increased efficiency of the piston engine with a more efficient coupling between the piston and/or the power shaft driving the crank.
Further objects and advantages of this invention will become apparent from a complete reading of the following specification.